VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Baoxiong Jia
dblp:206/8738
· DBLP profile ↗
34ranked-venue papers
4as first author
29since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-4968-3290ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 34 · 4 first-author · 29 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 20 · 2 first-author · 17 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 3 · 3 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Unveiling the Mist over 3D Vision-Language Understanding: Object-centric Evaluation with Chain-of-AnalysisabstractExisting 3D vision-language (3D-VL) benchmarks fall short in evaluating 3D-VL models, creating a "mist" that obscures rigorous insights into model capabilities and 3D-VL tasks. This mist persists due to three key limitations. First, flawed test data, like ambiguous referential text in the grounding task, can yield incorrect and unreliable test results. Second, oversimplified metrics such as simply averaging accuracy per question answering (QA) pair, cannot reveal true model capability due to their vulnerability to language variations. Third, existing benchmarks isolate the grounding and QA tasks, disregarding the underlying coherence that QA should be based on solid grounding capabilities. To unveil the "mist", we propose Beacon3D, a benchmark for 3D-VL grounding and QA tasks, delivering a perspective shift in the evaluation of 3D-VL understanding. Beacon3D features (i) high-quality test data with precise and natural language, (ii) object-centric evaluation with multiple tests per object to ensure robustness, and (iii) a novel chain-of-analysis paradigm to address language robustness and model performance coherence across grounding and QA. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art 3D-VL models on Beacon3D reveals that (i) object-centric evaluation elicits true model performance and particularly weak generalization in QA; (ii) grounding-QA coherence remains fragile in current 3D-VL models, and (iii) incorporating large language models (LLMs) to 3D-VL models, though as a prevalent practice, hinders grounding capabilities and has yet to elevate QA capabilities. We hope Beacon3D and our comprehensive analysis could benefit the 3D-VL community towards faithful developments. Jiangyong Huang, Baoxiong Jia, Yan Wang 0116, Xiongkun Linghu, Qing Li 0003, Song-Chun Zhu, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | MOVIS: Enhancing Multi-Object Novel View Synthesis for Indoor ScenesabstractRepurposing pre-trained diffusion models has been proven to be effective for NVS. However, these methods are mostly limited to a single object; directly applying such methods to compositional multi-object scenarios yields inferior results, especially incorrect object placement and inconsistent shape and appearance under novel views. How to enhance and systematically evaluate the cross-view consistency of such models remains under-explored. To address this issue, we propose MOVIS to enhance the structural awareness of the view-conditioned diffusion model for multi-object NVS in terms of model inputs, auxiliary tasks, and training strategy. First, we inject structure-aware features, including depth and object mask, into the denoising U-Net to enhance the model’s comprehension of object instances and their spatial relationships. Second, we introduce an auxiliary task requiring the model to simultaneously predict novel view object masks, further improving the model’s capability in differentiating and placing objects. Finally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the diffusion sampling process and carefully devise a structure-guided timestep sampling scheduler during training, which balances the learning of global object placement and fine-grained detail recovery. To systematically evaluate the plausibility of synthesized images, we propose to assess cross-view consistency and novel view object placement alongside existing image-level NVS metrics. Extensive experiments on challenging synthetic and realistic datasets demonstrate that our method exhibits strong generalization capabilities and produces consistent novel view synthesis, highlighting its potential to guide future 3D-aware multi-object NVS tasks. Our project page is available at https://jason-aplp.github.io/MOVIS/. Ruijie Lu, Yixin Chen 0003, Junfeng Ni, Baoxiong Jia, Yu Liu 0110, Diwen Wan, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2025 | Masked Point-Entity Contrast for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene UnderstandingabstractOpen-vocabulary 3D scene understanding is pivotal for enhancing physical intelligence, as it enables embodied agents to interpret and interact dynamically within real-world environments. This paper introduces MPEC, a novel Masked Point-Entity Contrastive learning method for open-vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation that leverages both 3D entity-language alignment and point-entity consistency across different point cloud views to foster entity-specific feature representations. MPEC improves semantic discrimination and enhances the differentiation of unique instances, achieving state-of-the-art results on ScanNet for open-vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation and demonstrating superior zero-shot scene understanding capabilities. Extensive fine-tuning experiments on 8 datasets, spanning from low-level perception to high-level reasoning tasks, showcase the potential of learned 3D features, driving consistent performance gains across varied 3D scene understanding tasks. Yan Wang 0116, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | METASCENES: Towards Automated Replica Creation for Real-world 3D ScansabstractEmbodied AI (EAI) research requires high-quality, diverse 3D scenes to effectively support skill acquisition, sim-to-real transfer, and generalization. Achieving these quality standards, however, necessitates the precise replication of real-world object diversity. Existing datasets demon strate that this process heavily relies on artist-driven designs, which demand substantial human effort and present significant scalability challenges. To scalably produce realistic and interactive 3D scenes, we first present MetaScenes, a large-scale simulatable 3D scene dataset constructed from real-world scans, which includes 15366 objects spanning 831 fine-grained categories. Then, we introduce SCAN2SIM, a robust multi-modal alignment model, which enables the automated, high-quality replacement of assets, thereby eliminating the reliance on artist-driven designs for scaling 3D scenes. We further propose two benchmarks to evaluate MetaScenes: a detailed scene synthesis task focused on small item layouts for robotic manipulation and a domain transfer task in vision-and-language navigation (VLN) to validate cross-domain transfer. Results confirm MetaScenes ’s potential to enhance EAI by supporting more generalizable agent learning and sim-to-real applications, introducing new possibilities for EAI research. Huangyue Yu, Baoxiong Jia, Yixin Chen 0003, Yandan Yang, Puhao Li, Rongpeng Su, Qing Li 0003, Wei Liang 0008, Song-Chun Zhu, Tengyu Liu, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | GWM: Towards Scalable Gaussian World Models for Robotic Manipulation
Guanxing Lu, Baoxiong Jia, Puhao Li, Yixin Chen 0003, Ziwei Wang 0010, Yansong Tang, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2025 | Move to Understand a 3D Scene: Bridging Visual Grounding and Exploration for Efficient and Versatile Embodied NavigationabstractEmbodied scene understanding requires not only comprehending visual-spatial information that has been observed but also determining where to explore next in the 3D physical world. Existing 3D Vision-Language (3D-VL) models primarily focus on grounding objects in static observations from 3D reconstruction, such as meshes and point clouds, but lack the ability to actively perceive and explore their environment. To address this limitation, we introduce \underline{\textbf{M}}ove \underline{\textbf{t}}o \underline{\textbf{U}}nderstand (\textbf{\model}), a unified framework that integrates active perception with \underline{\textbf{3D}} vision-language learning, enabling embodied agents to effectively explore and understand their environment. This is achieved by three key innovations: 1) Online query-based representation learning, enabling direct spatial memory construction from RGB-D frames, eliminating the need for explicit 3D reconstruction. 2) A unified objective for grounding and exploring, which represents unexplored locations as frontier queries and jointly optimizes object grounding and frontier selection. 3) End-to-end trajectory learning that combines \textbf{V}ision-\textbf{L}anguage-\textbf{E}xploration pre-training over a million diverse trajectories collected from both simulated and real-world RGB-D sequences. Extensive evaluations across various embodied navigation and question-answering benchmarks show that MTU3D outperforms state-of-the-art reinforcement learning and modular navigation approaches by 14\%, 23\%, 9\%, and 2\% in success rate on HM3D-OVON, GOAT-Bench, SG3D, and A-EQA, respectively. \model's versatility enables navigation using diverse input modalities, including categories, language descriptions, and reference images. These findings highlight the importance of bridging visual grounding and exploration for embodied intelligence. Xilin Wang, Zhuofan Zhang, Xiaojian Ma 0001, Yixin Chen 0003, Baoxiong Jia, Wei Liang 0008, Zhidong Deng, Siyuan Huang 0001, Qing Li 0003 |
ICCV | 7 |
| 2025 | Building Interactable Replicas of Complex Articulated Objects via Gaussian SplattingabstractBuilding interactable replicas of articulated objects is a key challenge in computer vision. Existing methods often fail to effectively integrate information across different object states, limiting the accuracy of part-mesh reconstruction and part dynamics modeling, particularly for complex multi-part articulated objects. We introduce ArtGS, a novel approach that leverages 3D Gaussians as a flexible and efficient representation to address these issues. Our method incorporates canonical Gaussians with coarse-to-fine initialization and updates for aligning articulated part information across different object states, and employs a skinning-inspired part dynamics modeling module to improve both part-mesh reconstruction and articulation learning. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, including a new benchmark for complex multi-part objects, demonstrate that ArtGS achieves state-of-the-art performance in joint parameter estimation and part mesh reconstruction. Our approach significantly improves reconstruction quality and efficiency, especially for multi-part articulated objects. Additionally, we provide comprehensive analyses of our design choices, validating the effectiveness of each component to highlight potential areas for future improvement. Yu Liu 0110, Baoxiong Jia, Ruijie Lu, Junfeng Ni, Song-Chun Zhu, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2025 | PhysPart: Physically Plausible Part Completion for Interactable ObjectsabstractInteractable objects are ubiquitous in our daily lives. Recent advances in 3D generative models make it possible to automate the modeling of these objects, benefiting a range of applications from 3D printing to the creation of robot simulation environments. However, while significant progress has been made in modeling 3D shapes and appearances, modeling object physics, particularly for interactable objects, remains challenging due to the physical constraints imposed by interpart motions. In this paper, we tackle the problem of physically plausible part completion for interactable objects, aiming to generate 3D parts that not only fit precisely into the object but also allow smooth part motions. To this end, we propose a diffusion-based part generation model that utilizes geometric conditioning through classifier-free guidance and formulates physical constraints as a set of stability and mobility losses to guide the sampling process. Additionally, we demonstrate the generation of dependent parts, paving the way toward sequential part generation for objects with complex part-whole hierarchies. Experimentally, we introduce a new metric for measuring physical plausibility based on motion success rates. Our model outperforms existing baselines over shape and physical metrics, especially those that do not adequately model physical constraints. We also demonstrate our applications in 3D printing, robot manipulation, and sequential part generation, showing our strength in realistic tasks with the demand for high physical plausibility. Rundong Luo, Congyue Deng, Puhao Li, Baoxiong Jia, Leonidas J. Guibas, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
ICRA | 6 |
| 2025 | Closed-Loop Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation with GPT-4VabstractAutonomous robot navigation and manipulation in open environments require reasoning and replanning with closed-loop feedback. In this work, we present COME-robot, the first closed-loop robotic system utilizing the GPT-4V vision-language foundation model for open-ended reasoning and adaptive planning in real-world scenarios. COME-robot incorporates two key innovative modules: (i) a multi-level open-vocabulary perception and situated reasoning module that enables effective exploration of the 3D environment and target object identification using commonsense knowledge and situated information, and (ii) an iterative closed-loop feedback and restoration mechanism that verifies task feasibility, monitors execution success, and traces failure causes across different modules for robust failure recovery. Through comprehensive experiments involving 8 challenging real-world mobile and tabletop manipulation tasks, COME-robot demonstrates a significant improvement in task success rate ($\sim 35 \%$) compared to state-of-the-art methods. We further conduct comprehensive analyses to elucidate how COME-robot's design facilitates failure recovery, free-form instruction following, and long-horizon task planning. Peiyuan Zhi, Muzhi Han, Zeyu Zhang 0001, Zhitian Li, Ziyuan Jiao, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
ICRA | 8 |
| 2025 | SceneWeaver: All-in-One 3D Scene Synthesis with an Extensible and Self-Reflective AgentabstractIndoor scene synthesis has become increasingly important with the rise of Embodied AI, which requires 3D environments that are not only visually realistic but also physically plausible and functionally diverse. While recent approaches have advanced visual fidelity, they often remain constrained to fixed scene categories, lack sufficient object-level detail and physical consistency, and struggle to align with complex user instructions. In this work, we present SceneWeaver, a reflective agentic framework that unifies diverse scene synthesis paradigms through tool-based iterative refinement. At its core, SceneWeaver employs a language model-based planner to select from a suite of extensible scene generation tools, ranging from data-driven generative models to visual- and LLM-based methods, guided by self-evaluation of physical plausibility, visual realism, and semantic alignment with user input. This closed-loop reason-act-reflect design enables the agent to identify semantic inconsistencies, invoke targeted tools, and update the environment over successive iterations. Extensive experiments on both common and open-vocabulary room types demonstrate that \model not only outperforms prior methods on physical, visual, and semantic metrics, but also generalizes effectively to complex scenes with diverse instructions, marking a step toward general-purpose 3D environment generation. Yandan Yang, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2024 | Move as you Say, Interact as you can: Language-Guided Human Motion Generation with Scene AffordanceabstractDespite significant advancements in text-to-motion syn-thesis, generating language-guided human motion within 3D environments poses substantial challenges. These challenges stem primarily from (i) the absence of powerful generative models capable of jointly modeling natural language, 3D scenes, and human motion, and (ii) the generative models' in-tensive data requirements contrasted with the scarcity of comprehensive, high-quality, language-scene-motion datasets. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel two-stage frame-work that employs scene affordance as an intermediate representation, effectively linking 3D scene grounding and conditional motion generation. Our framework comprises an Affordance Diffusion Model (ADM) for predicting ex-plicit affordance map and an Affordance-to-Motion Diffusion Model (AMDM) for generating plausible human motions. By leveraging scene affordance maps, our method overcomes the difficulty in generating human motion under multimodal condition signals, especially when training with limited data lacking extensive language-scene-motion pairs. Our exten-sive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms all baselines on established benchmarks, in-cluding HumanML3D and HUMANISE. Additionally, we validate our model's exceptional generalization capabilities on a specially curated evaluation set featuring previously unseen descriptions and scenes. Yixin Chen 0003, Baoxiong Jia, Puhao Li, Jinlu Zhang 0001, Jingze Zhang, Tengyu Liu, Yixin Zhu 0001, Wei Liang 0008, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2024 | PhyScene: Physically Interactable 3D Scene Synthesis for Embodied AIabstractWith recent developments in Embodied Artificial Intel-ligence (EAI) research, there has been a growing demand for high-quality, large-scale interactive scene generation. While prior methods in scene synthesis have prioritized the naturalness and realism of the generated scenes, the physical plausibility and interactivity of scenes have been largely left unexplored. To address this disparity, we introduce PhyScene, a novel method dedicated to gener-ating interactive 3D scenes characterized by realistic lay-outs, articulated objects, and rich physical interactivity tai-lored for embodied agents. Based on a conditional diffusion model for capturing scene layouts, we devise novel physics-and interactivity-based guidance mechanisms that integrate constraints from object collision, room layout, and object reachability. Through extensive experiments, we demon-strate that PhyScene effectively leverages these guidance functions for physically interactable scene synthesis, out-performing existing state-of-the-art scene synthesis methods by a large margin. Our findings suggest that the scenes generated by PhyScene hold considerable potential for facilitating diverse skill acquisition among agents within in-teractive environments, thereby catalyzing further advance-ments in embodied AI research. Yandan Yang, Baoxiong Jia, Peiyuan Zhi, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2024 | SceneVerse: Scaling 3D Vision-Language Learning for Grounded Scene Understanding
Baoxiong Jia, Yixin Chen 0003, Huangyue Yu, Yan Wang 0116, Xuesong Niu, Tengyu Liu, Qing Li 0003, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
ECCV (9) | 1 |
| 2024 | SlotLifter: Slot-Guided Feature Lifting for Learning Object-Centric Radiance Fields
Yu Liu 0110, Baoxiong Jia, Yixin Chen 0003, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
ECCV (9) | 2 |
| 2024 | Unifying 3D Vision-Language Understanding via Promptable Queries
Zhuofan Zhang, Xiaojian Ma 0001, Xuesong Niu, Yixin Chen 0003, Baoxiong Jia, Zhidong Deng, Siyuan Huang 0001, Qing Li 0003 |
ECCV (44) | 6 |
| 2024 | An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D WorldabstractLeveraging massive knowledge from large language models (LLMs), recent machine learning models show notable successes in general-purpose task solving in diverse domains such as computer vision and robotics. However, several significant challenges remain: (i) most of these models rely on 2D images yet exhibit a limited capacity for 3D input; (ii) these models rarely explore the tasks inherently defined in 3D world, e.g., 3D grounding, embodied reasoning and acting. We argue these limitations significantly hinder current models from performing real-world tasks and approaching general intelligence. To this end, we introduce LEO, an embodied multi-modal generalist agent that excels in perceiving, grounding, reasoning, planning, and acting in the 3D world. LEO is trained with a unified task interface, model architecture, and objective in two stages: (i) 3D vision-language (VL) alignment and (ii) 3D vision-language-action (VLA) instruction tuning. We collect large-scale datasets comprising diverse object-level and scene-level tasks, which require considerable understanding of and interaction with the 3D world. Moreover, we meticulously design an LLM-assisted pipeline to produce high-quality 3D VL data. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate LEO's remarkable proficiency across a wide spectrum of tasks, including 3D captioning, question answering, embodied reasoning, navigation and manipulation. Our ablative studies and scaling analyses further provide valuable insights for developing future embodied generalist agents. Code and data are available on [project page](https://embodied-generalist.github.io/). Jiangyong Huang, Silong Yong, Xiaojian Ma 0001, Xiongkun Linghu, Puhao Li, Yan Wang 0116, Qing Li 0003, Song-Chun Zhu, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
ICML | 9 |
| 2024 | Multi-modal Situated Reasoning in 3D ScenesabstractSituation awareness is essential for understanding and reasoning about 3D scenes in embodied AI agents. However, existing datasets and benchmarks for situated understanding suffer from severe limitations in data modality, scope, diversity, and scale. To address these limitations, we propose Multi-modal Situated Question Answering (MSQA), a large-scale multi-modal situated reasoning dataset, scalably collected leveraging 3D scene graphs and vision-language models (VLMs) across a diverse range of real-world 3D scenes. MSQA includes 251K situated questionanswering pairs across 9 distinct question categories, covering complex scenarios and object modalities within 3D scenes. We introduce a novel interleaved multimodal input setting in our benchmark to provide both texts, images, and point clouds for situation and question description, aiming to resolve ambiguity in describing situations with single-modality inputs (e.g., texts). Additionally, we devise the Multi-modal Next-step Navigation (MSNN) benchmark to evaluate models’ grounding of actions and transitions between situations. Comprehensive evaluations on reasoning and navigation tasks highlight the limitations of existing vision-language models and underscore the importance of handling multi-modal interleaved inputs and situation modeling. Experiments on data scaling and crossdomain transfer further demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging MSQA as a pre-training dataset for developing more powerful situated reasoning models, contributing to advancements in 3D scene understanding for embodied AI. Xiongkun Linghu, Jiangyong Huang, Xuesong Niu, Xiaojian Ma 0001, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2023 | Diffusion-based Generation, Optimization, and Planning in 3D ScenesabstractWe introduce the SceneDiffuser, a conditional generative model for 3D scene understanding. SceneDiffuser provides a unified model for solving scene-conditioned generation, optimization, and planning. In contrast to prior work, SceneDiffuser is intrinsically scene-aware, physics-based, and goal-oriented. With an iterative sampling strategy, SceneDiffuser jointly formulates the scene-aware generation, physics-based optimization, and goal-oriented planning via a diffusion-based denoising process in a fully differentiable fashion. Such a design alleviates the discrepancies among different modules and the posterior collapse of previous scene-conditioned generative models. We evaluate the SceneDiffuser on various 3D scene understanding tasks, including human pose and motion generation, dexterous grasp generation, path planning for 3D navigation, and motion planning for robot arms. The results show significant improvements compared with previous models, demonstrating the tremendous potential of the SceneDiffuser for the broad community of 3D scene understanding. Siyuan Huang 0001, Puhao Li, Baoxiong Jia, Tengyu Liu, Yixin Zhu 0001, Wei Liang 0008, Song-Chun Zhu |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2023 | X-VoE: Measuring eXplanatory Violation of Expectation in Physical EventsabstractIntuitive physics is pivotal for human understanding of the physical world, enabling prediction and interpretation of events even in infancy. Nonetheless, replicating this level of intuitive physics in artificial intelligence (AI) remains a formidable challenge. This study introduces X-VoE, a comprehensive benchmark dataset, to assess AI agents’ grasp of intuitive physics. Built on the developmental psychology-rooted Violation of Expectation (VoE) paradigm, X-VoE establishes a higher bar for the explanatory capacities of intuitive physics models. Each VoE scenario within X-VoE encompasses three distinct settings, probing models’ comprehension of events and their underlying explanations. Beyond model evaluation, we present an explanation-based learning system that captures physics dynamics and infers occluded object states solely from visual sequences, without explicit occlusion labels. Experimental outcomes highlight our model’s alignment with human commonsense when tested against X-VoE. A remarkable feature is our model’s ability to visually expound VoE events by reconstructing concealed scenes. Concluding, we discuss the findings’ implications and outline future research directions. Through X-VoE, we catalyze the advancement of AI endowed with human-like intuitive physics capabilities. Bo Dai 0025, Linge Wang, Baoxiong Jia, Zeyu Zhang 0001, Song-Chun Zhu, Chi Zhang 0017, Yixin Zhu 0001 |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2023 | ARNOLD: A Benchmark for Language-Grounded Task Learning With Continuous States in Realistic 3D ScenesabstractUnderstanding the continuous states of objects is essential for task learning and planning in the real world. However, most existing task learning benchmarks assume discrete (e.g., binary) object goal states, which poses challenges for the learning of complex tasks and transferring learned policy from simulated environments to the real world. Furthermore, state discretization limits a robot’s ability to follow human instructions based on the grounding of actions and states. To tackle these challenges, we present ARNOLD, a benchmark that evaluates language-grounded task learning with continuous states in realistic 3D scenes. ARNOLD is comprised of 8 language-conditioned tasks that involve understanding object states and learning policies for continuous goals. To promote language-instructed learning, we provide expert demonstrations with template-generated language descriptions. We assess task performance by utilizing the latest language-conditioned policy learning models. Our results indicate that current models for language-conditioned manipulations continue to experience significant challenges in novel goal-state generalizations, scene generalizations, and object generalizations. These findings highlight the need to develop new algorithms that address this gap and underscore the potential for further research in this area. Project website: https://arnold-benchmark.github.io. Jiangyong Huang, Xiaofeng Gao 0002, Qingyang Wu, Wensi Ai, Demetri Terzopoulos, Song-Chun Zhu, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
ICCV | 11 |
| 2023 | Improving Object-centric Learning with Query Optimization
Baoxiong Jia, Yu Liu 0110, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2023 | Learning a Causal Transition Model for Object CuttingabstractCutting objects into desired fragments is challenging for robots due to the spatially unstructured nature of fragments and the complex one-to-many object fragmentation caused by actions. We present a novel approach to model object fragmentation using an attributed stochastic grammar. This grammar abstracts fragment states as node variables and captures causal transitions in object fragmentation through production rules. We devise a probabilistic framework to learn this grammar from human demonstrations. The planning process for object cutting involves inferring an optimal parse tree of desired fragments using the learned grammar, with parse tree productions corresponding to cutting actions. We employ Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to efficiently approximate the optimal parse tree and generate a sequence of executable cutting actions. The experiments demonstrate the efficacy in planning for object-cutting tasks, both in simulation and on a physical robot. The proposed approach outperforms several baselines by demonstrating superior generalization to novel setups, thanks to the compositionality of the grammar model. Zeyu Zhang 0001, Muzhi Han, Baoxiong Jia, Ziyuan Jiao, Yixin Zhu 0001, Song-Chun Zhu, Hangxin Liu |
IROS | 3 |
| 2023 | ProBio: A Protocol-guided Multimodal Dataset for Molecular Biology LababstractThe challenge of replicating research results has posed a significant impediment to the field of molecular biology. The advent of modern intelligent systems has led to notable progress in various domains. Consequently, we embarked on an investigation of intelligent monitoring systems as a means of tackling the issue of the reproducibility crisis. Specifically, we first curate a comprehensive multimodal dataset, named ProBio, as an initial step towards this objective. This dataset comprises fine-grained hierarchical annotations intended for the purpose of studying activity understanding in BioLab. Next, we devise two challenging benchmarks, transparent solution tracking and multimodal action recognition, to emphasize the unique characteristics and difficulties associated with activity understanding in BioLab settings. Finally, we provide a thorough experimental evaluation of contemporary video understanding models and highlight their limitations in this specialized domain to identify potential avenues for future research. We hope \dataset with associated benchmarks may garner increased focus on modern AI techniques in the realm of molecular biology. Jieming Cui, Ziren Gong, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang 0001, Zilong Zheng, Jianzhu Ma, Yixin Zhu 0001 |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2022 | Learning Algebraic Representation for Systematic Generalization in Abstract Reasoning
Chi Zhang 0017, Sirui Xie, Baoxiong Jia, Ying Nian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu 0001 |
ECCV (39) | 3 |
| 2022 | Latent Diffusion Energy-Based Model for Interpretable Text ModellingabstractLatent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in generative modeling. Fueled by its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space, recent works built upon it have made interesting attempts aiming at the interpretability of text modeling. However, latent space EBMs also inherit some flaws from EBMs in data space; the degenerate MCMC sampling quality in practice can lead to poor generation quality and instability in training, especially on data with complex latent structures. Inspired by the recent efforts that leverage diffusion recovery likelihood learning as a cure for the sampling issue, we introduce a novel symbiosis between the diffusion models and latent space EBMs in a variational learning framework, coined as the latent diffusion energy-based model. We develop a geometric clustering-based regularization jointly with the information bottleneck to further improve the quality of the learned latent space. Experiments on several challenging tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our model on interpretable text modeling over strong counterparts. Peiyu Yu, Sirui Xie, Xiaojian Ma 0001, Baoxiong Jia, Bo Pang 0004, Ruiqi Gao, Yixin Zhu 0001, Song-Chun Zhu, Ying Nian Wu |
ICML | 4 |
| 2022 | EgoTaskQA: Understanding Human Tasks in Egocentric VideosabstractUnderstanding human tasks through video observations is an essential capability of intelligent agents. The challenges of such capability lie in the difficulty of generating a detailed understanding of situated actions, their effects on object states (\ie, state changes), and their causal dependencies. These challenges are further aggravated by the natural parallelism from multi-tasking and partial observations in multi-agent collaboration. Most prior works leverage action localization or future prediction as an \textit{indirect} metric for evaluating such task understanding from videos. To make a \textit{direct} evaluation, we introduce the EgoTaskQA benchmark that provides a single home for the crucial dimensions of task understanding through question answering on real-world egocentric videos. We meticulously design questions that target the understanding of (1) action dependencies and effects, (2) intents and goals, and (3) agents' beliefs about others. These questions are divided into four types, including descriptive (what status?), predictive (what will?), explanatory (what caused?), and counterfactual (what if?) to provide diagnostic analyses on \textit{spatial, temporal, and causal} understandings of goal-oriented tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art video reasoning models on our benchmark and show their significant gaps between humans in understanding complex goal-oriented egocentric videos. We hope this effort would drive the vision community to move onward with goal-oriented video understanding and reasoning. Baoxiong Jia, Song-Chun Zhu, Siyuan Huang 0001 |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2021 | ACRE: Abstract Causal REasoning Beyond CovariationabstractCausal induction, i.e., identifying unobservable mechanisms that lead to the observable relations among variables, has played a pivotal role in modern scientific discovery, especially in scenarios with only sparse and limited data. Humans, even young toddlers, can induce causal relationships surprisingly well in various settings despite its notorious difficulty. However, in contrast to the commonplace trait of human cognition is the lack of a diagnostic benchmark to measure causal induction for modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Therefore, in this work, we introduce the Abstract Causal REasoning (ACRE) dataset for systematic evaluation of current vision systems in causal induction. Motivated by the stream of research on causal discovery in Blicket experiments, we query a visual reasoning system with the following four types of questions in either an independent scenario or an interventional scenario: direct, indirect, screening-off, and backward-blocking, intentionally going beyond the simple strategy of inducing causal relationships by covariation. By analyzing visual reasoning architectures on this testbed, we notice that pure neural models tend towards an associative strategy under their chance-level performance, whereas neuro-symbolic combinations struggle in backward-blocking reasoning. These deficiencies call for future research in models with a more comprehensive capability of causal induction. Chi Zhang 0017, Baoxiong Jia, Mark Edmonds, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2021 | Abstract Spatial-Temporal Reasoning via Probabilistic Abduction and Execution
Chi Zhang 0017, Baoxiong Jia, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2021 | A Generalized Earley Parser for Human Activity Parsing and PredictionabstractDetection, parsing, and future predictions on sequence data (e.g., videos) require the algorithms to capture non-Markovian and compositional properties of high-level semantics. Context-free grammars are natural choices to capture such properties, but traditional grammar parsers (e.g., Earley parser) only take symbolic sentences as inputs. In this paper, we generalize the Earley parser to parse sequence data which is neither segmented nor labeled. Given the output of an arbitrary probabilistic classifier, this generalized Earley parser finds the optimal segmentation and labels in the language defined by the input grammar. Based on the parsing results, it makes top-down future predictions. The proposed method is generic, principled, and widely applicable. Experiment results clearly show the benefit of our method for both human activity parsing and prediction on three video datasets. Siyuan Qi, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang 0001, Ping Wei 0001, Song-Chun Zhu |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 2 |
| 2020 | LEMMA: A Multi-view Dataset for LEarning Multi-agent Multi-task Activities
Baoxiong Jia, Yixin Chen 0003, Siyuan Huang 0001, Yixin Zhu 0001, Song-Chun Zhu |
ECCV (26) | 1 |
| 2019 | RAVEN: A Dataset for Relational and Analogical Visual REasoNingabstractDramatic progress has been witnessed in basic vision tasks involving low-level perception, such as object recognition, detection, and tracking. Unfortunately, there is still enormous performance gap between artificial vision systems and human intelligence in terms of higher-level vision problems, especially ones involving reasoning. Earlier attempts in equipping machines with high-level reasoning have hovered around Visual Question Answering (VQA), one typical task associating vision and language understanding. In this work, we propose a new dataset, built in the context of Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and aimed at lifting machine intelligence by associating vision with structural, relational, and analogical reasoning in a hierarchical representation. Unlike previous works in measuring abstract reasoning using RPM, we establish a semantic link between vision and reasoning by providing structure representation. This addition enables a new type of abstract reasoning by jointly operating on the structure representation. Machine reasoning ability using modern computer vision is evaluated in this newly proposed dataset. Additionally, we also provide human performance as a reference. Finally, we show consistent improvement across all models by incorporating a simple neural module that combines visual understanding and structure reasoning. Chi Zhang 0017, Feng Gao 0013, Baoxiong Jia, Yixin Zhu 0001, Song-Chun Zhu |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2019 | Learning Perceptual Inference by Contrastingabstract“Thinking in pictures,” [1] i.e., spatial-temporal reasoning, effortless and instantaneous for humans, is believed to be a significant ability to perform logical induction and a crucial factor in the intellectual history of technology development. Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI), fueled by massive datasets, deeper models, and mighty computation, has come to a stage where (super-)human-level performances are observed in certain specific tasks. However, current AI's ability in “thinking in pictures” is still far lacking behind. In this work, we study how to improve machines' reasoning ability on one challenging task of this kind: Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). Specifically, we borrow the very idea of “contrast effects” from the field of psychology, cognition, and education to design and train a permutation-invariant model. Inspired by cognitive studies, we equip our model with a simple inference module that is jointly trained with the perception backbone. Combining all the elements, we propose the Contrastive Perceptual Inference network (CoPINet) and empirically demonstrate that CoPINet sets the new state-of-the-art for permutation-invariant models on two major datasets. We conclude that spatial-temporal reasoning depends on envisaging the possibilities consistent with the relations between objects and can be solved from pixel-level inputs. Chi Zhang 0017, Baoxiong Jia, Feng Gao 0013, Yixin Zhu 0001, Hongjing Lu, Song-Chun Zhu |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2018 | Learning Human-Object Interactions by Graph Parsing Neural Networks
Siyuan Qi, Wenguan Wang, Baoxiong Jia, Jianbing Shen, Song-Chun Zhu |
ECCV (9) | 3 |
| 2018 | Generalized Earley Parser: Bridging Symbolic Grammars and Sequence Data for Future PredictionabstractFuture predictions on sequence data (e.g., videos or audios) require the algorithms to capture non-Markovian and compositional properties of high-level semantics. Context-free grammars are natural choices to capture such properties, but traditional grammar parsers (e.g., Earley parser) only take symbolic sentences as inputs. In this paper, we generalize the Earley parser to parse sequence data which is neither segmented nor labeled. This generalized Earley parser integrates a grammar parser with a classifier to find the optimal segmentation and labels, and makes top-down future predictions. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms other approaches for future human activity prediction. Siyuan Qi, Baoxiong Jia, Song-Chun Zhu |
ICML | 2 |